Friday, October 23, 2015

What
would the results of the 2015 election have been, with proportional
representation?

In
any election, as Prof. Dennis Pilon says: "Now
keep in mind that, when you change the voting system, you also change the
incentives that affect the kinds of decisions that voters might make. For
instance, we know that, when every vote counts, voters won't have to worry
about splitting the vote, or casting a strategic vote. Thus, we should expect
that support for different parties might change."

But on the votes as cast, the final count in my regional simulation is Liberals 143, Conservatives 105, New Democrats 69, Bloc 15, and Greens six; details below.

Negative voting mania

This
election featured a mania of bandwagon voting never before seen in Canada,
eclipsing even 1968’s Trudeaumania.

A
serious attempt at organized negative voting or tactical voting (which
Canadians insist on calling “strategic voting”) was made by LeadNow, based only
on local polling in 80 ridings over the month before the election. It had
little effect. The whole country swung behind the Liberals in the last few days
of the campaign, in a collective impulse to end the Harper government.
Recommendations by LeadNow to vote for 31 NDP candidates were successful in 13 cases,
but failed in 18 others.

Never again

The
polling swings of the last six months have clearly shown that Canadian voters
want more than two choices, if they can vote for what they want. This leaves a
vast number of voters, frustrated at having to vote against something on
October 19, saying “never again -- next time I want to vote for my first
choice.”

Polls
taken the day before the election correctly predicted the outcome, but until that
Sunday, polls had shown a Liberal minority government. Some newly elected
Liberal MPs had been encouraging NDP supporters to help elect a minority
Liberal government. They were apologetic: “I was expecting a minority
government.” Many people echoed a Globe and Mail columnist who wrote “What have
we done?” A voter’s anguished letter to Justin Trudeau went viral: “I did not
vote for you. I voted against the alternative. . . . Change the electoral
system.”

So
the first effect of using proportional representation would have been to end
strategic voting.

The
Liberal platform promised to “Make Every Vote Count:” to study electoral
reform, including both options: proportional representation, and ranked ballots
in single-member districts, and implement one of them in time for the next
election.

Fair
Vote Canada welcomed Justin Trudeau’s promise to make every vote count. “Never
again should we face a one-party, one-man government elected by a minority of
voters. We urge you to work with all Parties and enact voting rules for a true
and modern representative democracy in time for the next election. . . We are
calling on you to design a voting system for Canada in which every ballot
delivers equal representation.”

Preferential ballots will
not do

Preferential
ballots, of course, are intended to help centrist parties, who hope to be
everyone else’s second choice. But in Atlantic Canada, where the Liberals swept
all 32 seats, the preferential ballot would be a cure without a disease.

Stephane
Dion’s 2013 line was “Preferential voting . . . does nothing to correct the distortion
between votes and seats and the under-representation of national parties
compared to regional ones.” This has never been more obvious.
Surely very few in the Liberal Party will expect such a partisan quick fix to
be acceptable. Only proportional representation will make every vote count.

What would the 2015 votes
have produced under proportional representation?

It
is tempting to describe what result proportional representation would have
produced on the opinion polls taken before the niqab killed the NDP campaign in
Quebec and started what became a consensus, and then a mania.

But
that is wishful thinking. Let’s look instead at what the votes cast on Oct. 19
would have produced, under a proportional voting system. If nothing else, it
will demonstrate how PR in Canada would work.

Mixed ProportionalWith the Mixed Proportional system, you have two votes.
With one, you help elect a local MP as we do today. The majority of MPs would
still be local MPs.

With the other vote, you can vote for the party you want to see in
government, and for your favourite of your party’s regional candidates. So you
help elect a few regional MPs, topping-up the local results to make them match
the vote shares. Every vote counts: it’s proportional. You can vote for the
regional candidate you prefer: it’s personal. There are no closed lists. Voters
elect all the MPs.

This was supported by
the NDP MPs, half the Liberal caucus, and the smaller parties, in the House of
Commons on Dec. 3, 2014. It was even supported by former Conservative
independent Brant Rathgeber, to the surprise of some. He understood that, with two votes, you can
vote for the party you want in government. And you can also vote for the local
candidate you like best regardless of party, without hurting your party, since
it's the second (regional) ballot that determines the party make-up of the
legislature. About 32% of voters split their ballots this way in New Zealand
with a similar system.

This makes it easier for local MPs to get the support of people of all
political stripes. They can earn support for their constituency-representation
credentials, not just for their party. This boosts the kind of support MPs
bring with them into the House of Commons, thus strengthening their
independence.

Regional open list MMP

The
Law Commission’s 2004 report, Voting Counts, recommended “Within the context of a mixed member proportional system, Parliament
should adopt a flexible list system that provides voters with the option of
either endorsing the party “slate” or “ticket,” or of indicating a preference
for a candidate within the (regional) list.”

Similarly,
Fair Vote Canada’s 2015 campaign supported only models which respected the need for all MPs to face the
voters. And Leading Liberal MP Dominic Leblanc told Fair Vote Canada “I support
reforms to add elements of proportional representation that also ensure that
Members of Parliament remain directly accountable to their constituents first
and foremost.”

This
requires regions small enough to make regional MPs accountable. Regions
larger than 18 MPs would require a “bed-sheet ballot” to list the regional candidates
of all parties. The Law Commission Report was explicitly inspired by the models
of Scotland, which has 16-MSP regions, and Wales, which has 12-MHA regions.

Such
regions have an effective threshold of at least 5% in each region. The 2015
Green vote dropped to only 3.5% across Canada, while in 2008 it was 6.8%. So no
regional PR model will give most 2015 Green voters full representation. A 5% threshold would have cut them down
to four MPs from their BC base, where BC Green voters cast 8.24% of the ballots.

If the Greens doubled their vote with PR as they
would surely have done, they would have elected about 23 MPs across Canada, getting
official party status and overtaking the Bloc.

Province-by-province

Any
PR model for Canada will start by looking at votes province-by-province, since
the Constitution Act gives each province specified numbers of MPs. Perfect
province-wide proportionality would have resulted in 137 Liberal MPs, 109 Conservatives,
67 New Democrats, 10 Greens, and 15 Bloc Quebecois MPs. That’s assuming a
threshold of no higher than the 2% used by Jean Chretien for his great campaign
finance legacy, the per-vote subsidy.

Here’s
the list:

Lib,
Con, NDP, Green, Bloc

B.C.
15, 13, 11, 3

Alberta8, 21, 4, 1

Sask.3, 7, 4

Manitoba6, 5, 2, 1

Ontario55, 43, 20, 3

Quebec28, 13, 20, 2, 15

N.B.5,
3, 2

P.E.I.2,
1, 1

N.S.7,
2, 2

Nfld
& Lab. 5, 1, 1

Territories3, 0, 0

Total
137,
109, 67, 10, 15

The West wants in to the
Liberal caucus

One
thing can be said with certainty: the 2015 results under winner-take-all still
left Liberal voters in the West under-represented.

This
new government looks like a government of the GTA and Atlantic Canada. Out of
all Liberal voters across Canada, the 20% in the GTA elected 26% of the Liberal
caucus, while the 11% in Atlantic Canada elected 17% of the Liberal caucus. Western
Liberals cast 25% of the Liberal votes but elected only 16% of the caucus.

Liberal
women are especially under-represented in the West. Since Justin Trudeau will
make his first cabinet half women, gender parity has arrived in the federal
Liberal Party. Polls show 90% of
Canadians want to see more women elected. With good women among the regional
candidates, voters will vote for them.

Geographic
diversity

Some people think proportional representation
would mean big-city rule. Not so, as I will show.

In
the nine ridings of the BC Interior and North, Liberal voters cast 30% of the
votes, but elected only Stephen Fuhr, while the Conservatives elected five MPs.
A proportional system would have let voters in that region elect three Liberal
MPs, three Conservative MPs, and three New Democrats. Liberal voters might have
elected Karley Scott from West Kelowna and Tracy Calogheros from Prince George.

In
the seven ridings of Vancouver Island, Liberal voters cast 21% of the votes,
but elected no one, while NDP voters cast 33% of the ballots yet elected six of
the seven MPs. A proportional system would have let Liberal voters on Vancouver
Island elect one or two MPs such as David Merner from Victoria and Carrie
Powell-Davidson from the City of Parksville.

In Alberta, the 25% of the voters who voted
Liberal deserved to elect eight of its 34 MPs, yet elected only four, all men. A
proportional system would have let voters in Alberta elect eight Liberal MPs,
21 Conservative MPs, four NDP MPs, and one Green. If they had elected four
regional MPs, they might have been Kerry Cundal and Nirmala Naidoo from
Calgary, Chandra Kastern from Red Deer, and Karen Leibovici from Edmonton.

In Saskatchewan, the 24% of voters who voted
Liberal deserved to elect three of its 14 MPs, yet elected only Ralph Goodale. A
proportional system would have let voters in Saskatchewan elect three Liberal
MPs, seven Conservative MPs, and four NDP MPs. Liberal voters might have
elected Tracy Muggli from Saskatoon and aboriginal leader Lawrence Joseph from
Prince Albert.

The preferential ballot would not have helped
western Liberals. Only two ridings in Saskatchewan elected Conservative MPs by
less than 50% of the vote, and the NDP was second in both. In Alberta I
see only one riding where it might have helped Liberals.In central Canada, if it did anything it
would only have padded the Liberal majority.

Even some Ontario regions show the same lack of
Liberal MPs.

In the
15 ridings of West Central Ontario, Liberal voters cast 42% of the ballots,
while Conservative voters cast only 41%. Yet the region’s 15 MPs are ten
Conservatives and only five Liberals, all but one men. A proportional system would have
let voters in that region elect six Liberal MPs, six Conservative MPs, two New
Democrats and one Green. Liberal voters might have elected Orillia’s Liz Riley,
Muskoka’s Trisha Cowie, or Owen Sound’s Kimberley Love.

In the 11 ridings of southwestern Ontario, NDP
voters elected four MPs with 27% of the vote, yet the 33% who voted Liberal
elected only two MPs, one female. A proportional system would have let voters
in that region elect four Liberal MPs, four Conservative MPs, and three NDP
MPs. Liberal voters might have elected Chatham’s Katie Omstead and Lori
Baldwin-Sands from St. Thomas.

In any winner-take-all election, the largest party usually gets a “winner’s bonus.” In Quebec, the Liberal “winner’s bonus” was 12 seats, at the cost of the Bloc (five seats), NDP (four), Greens (two), and Conservatives (one). They not only swept the federalist ridings of Montreal and western Quebec, they even won nine of the 14 seats in south-shore Montérégie, leaving four for the NDP and one for the Bloc.

Overhangs

With a regonal MMP model, we risk local sweeps being
so extreme that they create “overhangs.” Those are results too disproportional
for the compensatory (“top-up”) MPs to correct, when they are only 37% of the total.
That’s the trade-off in the system design, to keep local ridings from being almost
double their present size.

This happened on Oct.19 with the never-before-seen
Liberal sweep of New Brunswick, and with the sweep of Toronto. In a simulation of
the 2015 votes cast with regions averaging only 12 MPs, this results in a bonus
of three MPs for the Liberals. With a real MMP election where voters have more
choice and do not need to cast negative votes, such sweeps will not normally
happen.

Also, the small vote for the Greens leaves them
with only six MPs, not the ten which perfect proportionality would give them. This
adds another two to the Liberal bonus, and gives the NDP a bonus also. The
final count in my regional simulation is Liberals 143, Conservatives 105, New
Democrats 69, Bloc 15, and Greens six.

Also, when we make districts small enough to make
regional MPs more accountable, we again risk local sweeps being too extreme. In
2015, that wasn’t the problem: a 25-MP Toronto region would have the identical overhang
to the two smaller regions.

Conclusion

Again,
the biggest result of using PR would be to end strategic voting, and to let
every voter help elect an MP representing his or her first choice of views.

About Me

Although I am a member of Fair Vote Canada's Council at the federal level, the views expressed on this blog are my own.
I have been a lawyer since 1971, an elected school trustee from 1982 to 1994, past chair of the Board of the Northumberland Community Legal Centre, and so on.